Israel: Misery loves company

I was in Israel at the time the space shuttle was shuttled.  Israeli friends were excited at the prospect of our two countries being united as never before through shared tragedy.  I joked that perhaps they imagined a suicide bomber was on-board the craft.  It was a joke well recieved.   I am hoping that the United States does not find itself in a situation in Iraq similar to the situation Israel finds itself embroiled in:
Issuing passbooks to an indigenous population; setting up check points throughout the territory;  subjecting entire populations to collective house arrest; tit for tat murders; subjecting one's self and one's community to suicide bombings; etc., etc.

KR
> --- Begin Message ---
> 1-Bethlehem 4 killed including 10 year old girl, 2 seriously injured 
> 2- Jenin: Three days of curfew and two martyrs in Jenin
> 3-A Bone from Rafah
> 4-Rest in God, Christina 
> ================================================================
> 1-Bethlehem 4 killed including 10 year old girl, 2 seriously injured 
>
> Monday, Mar. 25, 2003. 
>
> Israeli occupation forces killed two suspected Hamas members, a 10 
> year old girl, another passerby, and shot both of the girl's parents, 
> on Monday evening. The car containing the Hamas members was ambushed 
> along with another car containing the Sa'ada family of three, and 
> passerby Muwafat Badran. The ten year old girl was Christine Sa'ada. 
> Both her parents are still in critical condition. The death squad 
> left immediately after the attack.
>
> Upon getting word of the ambush, two ISMers from the office in Beit 
> Sahour went to the hospital where the body of Mr. Badran had already 
> been brought and where Christine was expected. After an hour of 
> waiting, we decided to go with a Reuters photographer back to the 
> scene. Why was this poor girl not brought to the hospital? We had 
> heard that she was still alive. Israeli army would not allow us any 
> where near the scene. 
>
> The Photographer was one of the first on the scene. He arrived at the 
> same time as the ambulance. The ambulance drivers took the injured to 
> Hadassah hospital. They were also able to get the body of Mr.Badran 
> to Hussein hospital. However, as soon as the army arrived, they 
> kicked out the other ambulance drivers and kept the other bodies at 
> the scene. It is a little confusing about exactly what happened 
> before the regular army arrived.  
>
> Haaretz reports that the ambush squad snatched two of the bodies when 
> they left. The Photographer says that the other bodies were there 
> when he arrived which was before the regular army. Either way, the 
> ambush squad left while innocent civilians, who they shot, were now 
> bleeding to death. I have no idea when Christine died. 
>
> Today we went to the funeral for Mr. Badran. While the funeral was 
> taking place, the Army was searching houses in shaerh al sahf area in 
> Bethlehem city . Following the funeral, we went to provide witness to 
> the searches. There were kids throwing rocks at the army vehicles and 
> we tried to calm this. We wanted to negotiate with the soldiers to 
> let some school girls go home. They would not. Finally, the soldiers 
> were finished and left. We went along with the local TV reporter and 
> cameraman to interview the victim
>
> They arrested two young Palestinians suspected to be hamas members. 
> They also harassed several other local families by throwing stones at 
> the windows and pointing their M-16 at the elderly women. 
>
> For more information contact:
>
> Tom (USA): 052-360-241
> Ghassan (Palestine): 054-441-603
> =================================================================
> 2- Jenin: Three days of curfew and two martyrs in Jenin
>
> The situation in Jenin during the last three days has seen continued 
> curfew, two martyrs, and one palestinian severly injured.
>
> Monday, 15 year-old Ahmaed Imad Abu Jildah was shot in the head and 
> died shortly after, at the Arazi hospital. The killer was an israeli 
> sniper on top of an occupied house in the town center. Jildah was one 
> of 30-40 young boys throwing rocks at israeli tanks, APCs, and jeeps, 
> who were patroling the town center shortly after noon. 
>
> Tuesday, 14 year-old Hakam Bassam Nasar and 12 year-old Nobani Jamal 
> Egubaria were both shot in the abdomen trying to climb a moving tank.
> Nasar died from his wounds at the Arazi Hospital, and Egubaria is in 
> critical condition.
>
> The Israeli Army maintains curfew with a  large number of tanks, 
> APCs, and jeeps, patroling night and day. All three victims were 
> murdered by curfew. 
>
> At least 26 houses are currently occupied by soldiers who are 
> gathering the residents in small rooms behind a locked door. Five ISM 
> activists from Sweden and Denmark have been  trying to prevent army 
> atrocities since the curfew was declared Sunday morning at 4 AM. 
>
> There were no injuries or martyrs on Sunday.  However, on monday the 
> situation intensified. That is when  30-40 young boys began throwing 
> rocks, garbage, and anything else available at the tanks, APC,s, and 
> Jeeps. The five ISM'ers have been doing everything possible to 
> decrease the danger in the town center.
>
> After approximately one hour, a palestinian boy tried to climb a 
> driving APC. He was shot in the leg. At that point, all five ISM'ers 
> abandoned the site in order to get him to the nearby Arazi Hospital. 
> Only a few minutes later, after all ISMer's were gone, Israeli 
> soldiers shot and killed Ahmaed Imad Abu Jildah. They shot him in the 
> head and within twenty minutes he was dead.
>
> At 3 PM Monday,  the Martyr Doctor Khalid Suliman Hospital in Jenin 
> was targeted by the Israeli army. A commander had ordered 
> the manager to meet him outside of the hospital. The commander told 
> the hospital manager that the hospital was a hiding place for several 
> young men and that it would be searched by soldiers within an hour.
>
> Entering hospitals in search for wanted men is a common way for the 
> Israeli army to violate both Israeli law and the human rights 
> constituted in the 4th Geneva Convention.
>
> The five ISM'ers entered the hospital to be present and provide 
> witness. . They contacted Mediciners and Frontiers in order to 
> increase pressure on the DCO. They also contacted the ISM media 
> office to send out a press release. Time went by and the 
> soldiers never showed up inside the hospital area.
>
> Later on Monday, ISM approached an occupied house in the refugee 
> camp. After some negotiations, one ISM'er was allowed to enter the 
> house. More than twenty palestinians were being held behind a locked 
> door in two small rooms. More than half of them were children, 
> including a baby approximately nine months old. They were in no 
> emergent need of either food or medicine.
>
> On tuesday, the intense situation continued. ISM entered the occupied 
> house in the refugee camp and delivered food, cigarettes and milk 
> powder for the baby. The palestinians in another occupied house in 
> the town center were in need of medicine; so two ISM activists 
> brought it to the door but were denied access by the soldiers.
>
> A third house in the town center was abondend by 13 soldiers at noon, 
> following 24 hours of occupation. The family of five was terrified 
> that they would return, so ISM held presence until late evening.
>
> During the entire curfew, the ISM have been riding with the Red 
> Crescent ambulances to ensure their freedom of movement.
>
> For More Information contact: 
>
> Lasse (Denmark): 059-386-896
> ===================================================================
> 3-A Bone from Rafah
> By Starhawk
>
> While bombs are falling on Baghdad, killing uncounted numbers, and my 
> friends around the world are marching, blockading, shutting down 
> corporations and roadways and cities in protest, I find myself in 
> Rafah, at the southern border of the Gaza strip, dealing intimately 
> with one womanıs death.
>
>    A week ago Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a bulldozer as 
> she tried to prevent it from demolishing Palestinian homes.  Iıve 
> come down here to support her friends and the activists who were with 
> her and saw the murder.  Their accounts leave no doubt that the 
> soldier who drove the bulldozer saw her and chose to kill her.
>
>    Rachel has become a Œshahidı, a Palestinian martyr.  She is, in 
> fact, one of over a thousand shahids from this intifada.  Their 
> posters adorn walls all over Palestine.  They are the fighters who 
> are killed in battle and the children shot on their way to school. 
>
>  They are the suicide bombers and the boys who throw stones at tanks 
> in a gesture of defiance, and the Œcollateral damageı every time the 
> Israelis blow up a political leader in a crowded tenement with 
> missiles.  And now they include Rachel, with her all-American blond 
> beauty.  On one poster: she looks earnest and sweet as any graduating 
> student in  High School yearbook.  In another, she is giving a 
> speech, hair tied back, mouth open, her whole face ablaze with 
> passion.
>
>    Iım listening to her friends describe her death and holding their 
> hands as they cry and thinking about how all of this pain and grief 
> and sorrow is being multiplied over and over again right now, in 
> Baghdad, on people who are nameless and faceless and not reported on 
> by our media.  As Rachelıs death would have gone unremarked had she 
> been Palestinian.  You didnıt hear, I imagine, about the death 
> of .Ahmed, a fifty year old street cleaner from Rafah, who heard 
> about Rachelıs death and stepped outside to smoke a cigarette.  He 
> was gunned down on his doorstep, for no particular reason anyone can 
> fathom.  He has his own Shahid poster, which is up on the wall next 
> to Rachelıs, and we mourn him, too.
>
>    The Palestinians have traditions about Shahids‹the poster is one.
>   The Shahidıs body is not touched with water: the blood on the body 
> is sacred, and bloody the body is laid into the grave.
>
>    These traditions are of some comfort to the Palestinians but are 
> difficult for her friends who cannot escape her face and their loss 
> anywhere in this city, and who struggle to remember her not as a 
> saint but as the real woman that she was: sometimes strong, sometimes 
> weak, sometimes loving, sometimes irritable, funny, annoying, 
> angry‹all the things human beings are.  Rachel was a courageous women 
> but no more so, really, than any of these others who have come here 
> on their school breaks or in the midst of their life changes to stand 
> in front of tanks and walk kids to school and sleep in a different, 
> threatened house each night.  They are all remarkable, 
> courageous‹which doesnıt mean noble and saintly but just that at some 
> point in their lives they decided not to let fear stop them from 
> doing something they hope will make some slight positive impact on an 
> unendurable situation.  What is remarkable about them is that they 
> are not so remarkable, not really so different than anyone else. A 
> laid-off dot commer, a football player, a website designer, a 
> student, a sweet young man who drives a horse and carriage in the 
> park:some are deeply political, involved in actions for many years. 
>  Some just somehow found themselves drawn to come here. 
>
>    I am drinking coffee with Chris, who was Rachelıs friend and 
> encouraged her to come to Gaza, and Mohammed, who has lived his whole 
> live in the Gaza strip and works with a human rights agency. Mohammed 
> is telling us how he felt on his trip to Japan when he took the train 
> from Tokyo to Osaka. 
>  
>    "I had never before been such a long way without a single 
> checkpoint, without having to show a passport or an ID card, without 
> seeing a soldier," he says.  "That was when I knew what freedom felt 
> like." 
>
> We are talking about sadness and death and what we believe.
> Iıve been having ongoing dialogues with various friends about 
> compassion, and I admit that I just canıt get there with the 
> bulldozer operator.  The closest I can come to cmpassion is a kind of 
> blank incomprehension.  Chris suggests that Rachel died because the 
> soldier didnıt see her.  Not that he didnıt see her physically, for 
> it is only too clear that he did, but that in some larger sense he 
> didnıt See her, see her as a human being, see her as a precious life 
> to be valued.
>
>    That Unseeing is the root of my own peopleıs relationship to the 
> Palestinians.  I was never taught to hate them‹only to discount 
> them.  When they taught me the story of Israelıs founding in Hebrew 
> School, the Palestinians were brushed aside, either not mentioned or 
> dismissed as somehow not mattering.
>
>    I can understand how, to my grandmother raised in abject poverty 
> in a Russian shtetl and living in slightly-less-abject poverty in 
> Duluth, the Palestinians could disappear‹she never came to this land, 
> never met one of its people.  I can comprehend how Jews from the 
> concentration camps and refugees fleeing Nazi Europe could long for a 
> state of their own, and how from Hitlerıs Germany Palestinians 
> werenıt much of a visible presence in the consciousness of terrified 
> people needing a refuge.
>
>    But those who were actually there on the land, creating the Œfacts 
> on the groundı of their time, must have noticed and deliberately 
> chosen to unsee that there was another people standing in the way, 
> doing their best not to be bulldozed into oblivion.  As Sharon and 
> Bush and all their supporters and all who stand by silently and 
> justify the current murders donıt see.  As we are not shown the 
> victims of the bombs of Baghdad.
>
>    Thereıs a Bible story haunting me that seems tangled up with this 
> all.  Itıs one they never focused on in Hebrew School‹the story of 
> the Levite and the Concubine.  It goes like this:
>
>    A Levite was travelling with his concubine and is given shelter 
> for the night by an old man in the town of Gideon in the territory of 
> the tribe of Benjamin.  During the night a pack of men demand to have 
> sex with him.  Instead, the host and the Levite send out the 
> concubine, who is gang-raped and left for dead on the doorstep.  When 
> the traveller reaches home, he cuts up her body into twelve pieces 
> and sends one to each tribe, to call them to war.
>
>    The war is bloody and involves several rounds of smiting and 
> killing sixteen thousand here, twenty thousand there, in a frenzy  
> almost as senseless as our current assault on Iraq, until Benjamin is 
> defeated and all the other tribes swear not to give their daughters 
> to wife with Benjamin.  Whereupon they realize they have committed 
> genocide, wiped out a tribe of their own.  Repenting of this ethnic 
> cleansing, they find some innocent town which has not participated in 
> this oath and simply kill all the men and all the women who have 
> known men, and give all the virgins to Benjamin.
>
>    I am thinking about this as I try to fathom what has been done to 
> the mind of the bulldozer operator to make him capable of 
> deliberately crushing a beautiful young woman under his machine, and 
> trying to comprehend the hatemail and diatribes her death has evoked 
> along with the paeons of praise and the martyr posters.
>
>    And I conclude that the soldier was only doing what colonization 
> makes necessary.  To be a colonizer, we cannot afford to see the 
> colonized as fully human.
>
>    So when you tell me, "The Palestinians are taught to hate‹ Barak 
> offered them everything but they donıt want peace--they donıt love 
> their children‹they are animals‹there is no one to talk to" I 
> say, "That is what colonization requires you to believe."
>
>    It diminishes you, as the driver of that bulldozer is diminished 
> by his act far, far more than the crushing of Rachelıs body can ever 
> diminish her.  
>
>    And if I could, I would send you a bone.  Not to call you to war, 
> but away from it.  Something you cannot avoid seeing, touching. 
>  Something to make the blood on our hands visible, unmistakeable.  A 
> limb, a shoulder, a hunk of flesh dripping real blood, from the 
> rubble beneath the bulldozer, the doorstep, from the child shot dead 
> in the gunfight or buried under the house, from the bomb shelters of 
> Baghdad and from the bloody busses of Tel Aviv.  A bone red with 
> blood to say:
>
>    This is what colonization requires: blood soaked sand, holy earth 
> defiled with death, human sacrifice.
>
> For more information contact:
> Starhawk (USA):059-713-923
> ===============================================================
> 4-Rest in God, Christina 
> Dear friends,
>  
> Early last evening I was on the phone to a friend in the US, when 
> gunfire erupted nearby. It was loud enough that my friend on the other
> end of the line could hear it.  A few seconds later another loud round
> went off.  Moments later I could hear the sound of an ambulance
> approaching.  The local television station was soon showing a group of
> Palestinian medics trying to carry away someone who had been killed, a
> car with the entire back window blasted out and the trunk riddled with
> bullet holes, and a few Israeli soldiers in uniform keeping watch on
> everything.
>  
> The scene was on the hill just 4 houses up the street from my own, so
> I immediately called to see if everyone there was all right, figuring
> any bullets that went over the car could easily have entered the front
> of the house. Fortunately, everyone there was fine.  The early news
> was that 2 men had been killed, allegedly men that an IDF undercover
> unit was trying to arrest.  But, this was not the final story.
>  
> Israeli accounts were that someon in the first car shot at the
> undercover unit and then the unit returned fire.  Another car
> approached and the soldiers opened fire on it as well, saying they
> feared they were under attack.
>  
> This second car contained a young Christian family - the father and
> mother and their 2 daughters, age 15 and 10.  The youngest, Christina
> Sa'ada, a bright 10-year old and a student at St. Joseph's School in
> Bethlehem, was killed instantly.  Her sister was shot in the knee and
> the father in the side.  According to witnesses the undercover unit
> put the wounded family in their cars and sped them to the checkpoint,
> sending them by ambulance to Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. 
>
> Christina's body was kept at the checkpoint and was evidently not
> allowed to be picked up until 11:00 pm last night.  The bodies of 2 of
> the men that were killed in the first car were also taken away.  The
> third man killed, who just happened to be in the car and was not
> involved in any political action according to his family and friends,
> was finally taken to the local hospital. 
>  
> Many questions must be asked about this 'operation,'  not least why
> would the unit open up with a barrage of bullets in the middle of the
> intersection between a central market area and a residential area on a
> main transition street in the early evening hours when many people
> could be passing by?
>  
> Christina's funeral will most likely not take place for a couple of
> days, as the father has not yet recovered enough for the doctors to
> tell him of her death. Marianna, Christina's 15 year old sister, is
> recoverying today from the surgery to remove bullet fragments from her
> knee. 
>  
> As war rages to the east of us, we continue to bury the dead here.
> When will it end?
>  
> Rest in God, Christina - we'll miss your bright smile...
>  
> Sandra
>  
> Rev. Sandra Olewine
> United Methodist Liaison - Jerusalem
> solewine@annadwa.org
> ================================================================
>
>
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